‘And you don’t?’
She sighed. ‘I don’t trust this.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean, this?’
‘It means this fucking dive back to the visceral level all the time. This throwing your weight around and pissing people off and pushing until something breaks loose and gives us someone new to fight. Confrontation, escalation, fucking death or glory.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘I mean, maybe that worked for Project Lawman back in the day, but it isn’t going to cut it here. This is an investigation, not a brawl.’
‘Osprey.’
‘What?’
‘Osprey. I’m not American, I was never part of Project Lawman.’ He frowned, flicker of something recalled, too faint now to get back. ‘And another thing I’m not, Ertekin, just so you keep it in mind. I’m not Ethan.’
For a moment, he thought she’d explode on him, the way she had the night before on the highway, with the corpses draped across the stalled and blinded jeep. But she only hooded her gaze and turned away.
‘I know who you are,’ she said quietly.
They didn’t speak again until they reached the airport.
They made the Lima flight with a couple of minutes to spare, got into the capital on time and confirmed their places on the Oakland suborb an hour before it lifted.
Time to kill.
Quiet amidst the bustle and vaulted space of the Lima terminal, Sevgi faced herself in a washroom mirror. She stared for what seemed like a long time, then shrugged and fed herself the syn capsules one at a time.
Dry-swallowed and grimaced as they went down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Alcatraz station. Special Cases division.
By the time she got there, the superfunction capsules had kicked in with a vengeance. Her feelings were her own again, vacuum-packed back into the steel canister she’d made for them. An icy detachment propped up focus and attention to the detail beyond the mirror.
Another fucking mirror, she noted.
But this time she sat behind the glass and watched the scene in the interview room on the other side. Coyle and Rovayo and a woman who sprawled leggily in the chair provided, wore form-fitting black under a heavy leather jacket she hadn’t bothered to take off, and watched her interrogators with energetic, gum-chewing dislike. She was young, not far into her twenties, and her harsh-boned, Slavic face carried the sneer well. The rest was pure Rim mix – short blonde hair hacked about in a classic Djakarta shreddie cut that didn’t really suit her, crimson Chinese characters embroidered down the leg of her one-piece from hip to ankle, the baroque blue ink of a Maori-look skin-sting curled across her left temple. Her voice, as it strained through the speaker to the observer’s gallery, was heavily accented.
‘Look, what you fucking want from me? Everything you ask me, I give you answers. Now I got places I got to be.’ She leaned across the table. ‘You know, I don’t show up for shift tonight, they don’t pay me. Not like you public-sector guys.’
‘Zdena Tovbina,’ said Norton. ‘Filigree Steel co-worker. They got her off video archive from the block where this guy used to live. Seems she came looking for him when he didn’t show up for work two shifts running.’
‘Nice of her. Shame Filigree Steel didn’t think to do the same thing.’
Norton shrugged. ‘Fluid labour market, you know how it is. Apparently they did call him a couple of times, but when he didn’t call back, they just assumed he’d moved on. Hired someone else to fill his shifts. These security grunts make shit, staff turnover’s through the roof. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Unionise, maybe?’
‘Ssssh.’
In the interview room, Alicia Rovayo was pacing about. ‘We’ll inform your shift manager if we need to keep you much longer. Meantime, let’s go over it one more time. You say you didn’t actually know anything was wrong with Driscoll.’
‘No, I knew was something wrong. Something wrong was he saw inside of that ship.’ For just a moment, Zdena Tovbina looked haunted. ‘When we saw, we all got sick. Joey was first, but we all saw what was there.’
‘You actually saw Driscoll vomiting?’ Coyle asked from his seat.
‘No, we heard.’ Tovbina tapped her ear twice, graphically. ‘Squad net. Radio.’
‘And later, when you saw him?’
‘He was quiet. Would not talk.’ A phlegmatic, open-handed gesture. ‘I tried, he turned away from me. Very male, you know.’
‘These guys went in masked,’ Norton murmured. ‘Minimal stuff, upper face goggle wrap, but they were smearing anti-contaminants as well. You beginning to see where this is going?’
Sevgi nodded glumly. She glanced across the gallery at Marsalis, but he was focused wholly on the woman beyond the glass.
‘When was the last time you actually saw Joseph Driscoll?’ Coyle asked patiently.
Tovbina all but ground her teeth in frustration. ‘I have told you. He went back on Red Two shuttle. Climbed in by mistake. We were all shaken. Not thinking right. When we’re back at base, I looked for him in squad room. He was already gone.’
‘Oh yeah,’ breathed Marsalis. ‘He was gone all right.’
‘Where’d they find the body?’ Sevgi asked.
‘Caught up in deep-water cabling a hundred and something metres down, on the edge of one of these bioculture platforms they’ve got out there. It’s pretty much the area where Horkan’s Pride came down, allowing for drift. Whoever threw Driscoll over the side weighted him around the legs with a couple of bags of junk from the Horkan’s Pride galley. Probably made them up in advance. Took him down fast and clean, heading for the seabed until he hit something that snagged him. Pure chance a repair crew was out that way yesterday.’
‘Did he drown?’
‘No, looks like he was dead before he went into the water. Crushed larynx, snapped neck.’
‘Fuck. Weren’t these guys wearing vital-signs vests?’
‘Yeah, but no one checks them apparently. Staffing cuts. Filigree Steel eliminated the deck medics on their shuttles some time last year when they went up for retender.’
‘Great.’
‘Yeah, market forces, don’t you just love them? Oh yeah, and there are a lot of smaller contusions on Driscoll as well, some abrasions too. Forensics reckon he was stuffed inside one of the disposal chutes up near the kitchen section, then dumped straight out into the ocean. A couple of those hatches at least would have been on the submerged side of the hull. No one would have noticed.’
Sevgi shook her head. ‘Blowing an outer hatch should have shown up on a scanner somewhere. Takes power. Either that, or you have to use the explosive bolts like he did with the access hatches, and that would have made a noise, even submerged.’
‘There’d be plenty of power in the onboard batteries,’ said Marsalis distantly. ‘You wouldn’t need the bolts. And by the look of it, these people were too busy puking their guts up to be watching their screens for low-level electrical activity.’
He sat back and puffed out his cheeks.
‘Our boy Merrin really played this one.’ He shook his head. ‘A thing of beauty, really.’
Norton shot him an unfriendly look.
‘So.’ Sevgi wanted to hear someone say it, even if it was her. ‘Merrin walks out of there as Driscoll. Steals his gear, masks up, and slips aboard the wrong transport in the general confusion. Think that was deliberate, or did he just luck out?’